HIV Vaccine Day

And as one involved (or formerly involved, thanks to the effective demise of our funding agency…) in HIV vaccine research, it is criminal that I missed this yesterday – but the UCT Monday paper caught it, so let’s see what they said:

World AIDS Vaccine Day, May 18, marks the occasion in 1997 when US President Bill Clinton challenged researchers to come up with an AIDS vaccine within the following decade, stating that such a vaccine was the only way to eliminate the threat of AIDS. …

Researchers from UCT’s Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine (IIDMM) have announced that their two new preventative HIV vaccines have reached the first stage of human clinical trials, a first for Africa.

This trial, called SAAVI 102/HVTN 073, is also a milestone for South Africa. The country is one of the few developing nations to have developed an HIV vaccine and progressed it into human clinical trials.

The Desmond Tutu HIV Centre, based at the IIDMM, is one of three sites in the world that will conduct the trials. The others sites are in Johannesburg and Boston in the US.

These vaccines are a culmination of eight years of research by scientists at the IIDMM, UCT, and collaborators from the US National Institutes of Health and the Vaccine Research Centre. Their development and testing has been underpinned by funding from the South African AIDS Vaccine Initiative (SAAVI) and the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

…The initial human trial is being conducted jointly with the HIV Vaccine Trials Network and the NIAID, part of the US National Institutes of Health.

There is a wealth of science behind the vaccines, of course: I am listing a few of the papers giving the historical background to the DNA and the modified vaccinia Ankara virus (MVA, a smallpox vaccine strain) that are about to be used in the trial, below.